Milestone 10 Report — October 2026
October was another big one for Zk Av Club!
Between Zcon7 in Cancún and Zcash’s 10th birthday, several projects we’ve been working on all year came together.
Our Zcash 10th Birthday Short Film Festival brought in 33 eligible films, so we raised the prize pool to 20 ZEC! We published eight Recording Station videos, held two workshops, nearly finished uploading the historic Zcon collection to Internet Archive, and completed our Dark Prague open media archive.
Zcon7: Recording Station in Cancún
We brought the Zk Av Club Recording Station to Zcon7 in Cancún after spending much of the last two months preparing for it.
Recording Station gives people a place to make their own media. Participants own their source recordings and can choose to share them in our open media archive under a Creative Commons license.
Our retrospective is happening later this week, so we’ll save the full story for November. In the meantime, we’re moving the Zcon7 recordings to the front of our archive and release queue.
A huge thank you to @ZcashFoundation for inviting us to bring Recording Station to Cancún and for supporting the club and my work for so many years. It means a lot to have you in our corner as we keep building this thing together!
We’ll keep documenting the activation in our Zcon7 thread:
Dark Prague Zero: The Dream of Open-Source Media Is Now Our Reality!
Source files from all 11 conversations at our Dark Prague 2025 Recording Station are now on Internet Archive!
Mixnets, ham radio, ecash, zines, cypherpunk culture, and stories from Ethereum’s earliest days. All preserved beyond any single publishing platform and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), ready for people to discover, research, share, and build on.
This one means a lot to me. We’re finally seeing the dream of open-source media become real, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who helped us get here.
Special thanks to @kxknowsbetter for inviting us to Dark Prague and being patient with our process, Irena for taking ownership of the archive pipeline, and Dayvan for driving our storytelling and releases. And to our Dark Prague crew, @Zerodartz, @j32804, and @squirrel, whose support and participation made this happen.
The archive is open. Listen, research, make something from it. Lots more to come!
Zk Av Club Recording Station Archive on Internet Archive:
Dark Prague announcement thread, with links to the individual recordings:
Zcon Archive: Almost There!
We’d hoped to finish uploading the historic Zcon collection to Internet Archive in September. It’s taken longer than planned, but we’re now down to just three recordings!
Dig into the Zcon archive:
Next comes making the collection easier to explore and use: better titles and descriptions, high-quality transcripts for every video, and original camera-source footage from Zcon0 and Zcon1.
We’ve also started making this history easier to discover with our Zcash History Through Zcon: Top 40 collection on WatchZ.cash. In November, we’re planning to set up a dedicated Zcon Omeka S instance for deeper research and exploration of the full archive.
Zcash 10th Birthday Short Film Festival
We challenged filmmakers to tell stories about Zcash’s first decade in three to five minutes, using historic Zcon recordings for more than half of their spoken-word audio. By the October 16 deadline, we had 33 eligible films, so we raised the prize pool to 20 ZEC! The top five films will receive 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2 ZEC.
Seeing people dig through old Zcon presentations and turn them into new films has been especially exciting. This is the kind of creative reuse we hoped to inspire when we started researching and organizing Zcash’s video history.
We’d planned to reveal the winners in a livestream from Zcon7 on October 28, Zcash’s 10th birthday. With so much happening in Cancún, we postponed the screening and results announcement. We’ll announce a new date in the festival thread and on our social channels.
Recording Station: Eight Videos Published
Eight new Recording Station videos went out in October! From cypherpunk culture and privacy education to real-world Zcash adoption and even an improvised performance at DWeb Camp.
Sculpting the Dark Forest Beyond Code: Juraj and Josh on Cypherpunk Aesthetics
Cypherpunk isn’t just code! At Dark Prague, Juraj and Josh of Bitpunk.fm talk cassettes, poetry, zines, and storytelling. What happens when a movement builds the technology but forgets the culture?
Uncomfortable Truths: Where Did the Cypherpunk Dream Go?
Ann, Irena, and Wassim take a hard look at crypto’s journey from cypherpunk ideals to today’s industry. Bitcoin, Ethereum, venture capital, network states, and whether we’re still solving the problems we set out to solve.
The Rabbit and the Clown: A Performance by Fly, Lauscher, and Mandina at DWeb
At DWeb Camp, Fly, Lauscher, and Mandina create an improvised performance around the Fool, curiosity, and stepping into the unknown. Not every Recording Station conversation needs to look like an interview.
red·bridge: A Guardian Model That Brings Business to Zcash
Kit and John discuss red·bridge at Devconnect, exploring how Avalanche’s speed and interoperability could connect with Zcash’s privacy through a guardian-based approach that doesn’t give one party control.
A Lesson With No Precedent: Teaching Privacy in the Digital Age
Ryan sits down with Naomi Brockwell to talk about the Ludlow Institute and the challenge of teaching privacy to people who may never have had to think about it. How do you help people protect something they’ve always taken for granted?
Zcash Community Grants Candidate: Building for Everyone in the Room
At Berlin Blockchain Week, Mylo Bennett discusses their ZCG committee candidacy, the practical infrastructure Zcash needs, and financial inclusion. They also talk about bringing Zcash payments to event workers and vendors, not just attendees.
Zebra: A Quick Hello With a Zcash Foundation Developer
John catches up with Alfredo Garcia of the Zcash Foundation at Devconnect to talk about Zebra, shielded assets, private stablecoins, and preparing Zcash for a post-quantum future.
Privacy Learned and Taught on the Ground: Zcash in Real Life
Violet Rollergirl tells Ryan how she found Zcash and started teaching others to use it. Her workshops start with why privacy matters, not just which buttons to press.
Behind the releases
Robmarn is working with several editors to get exports and thumbnails ready ahead of release week, giving Dayvan more time to find the story in each conversation. Dayvan is documenting that storytelling process so others can use it, and trying out YouTube collaborations to help the recordings reach new audiences.
Big thanks to our growing community editing crew, @PacDc, YF, @dvdt3ddy, @Zalfred, @DarwinZ, and @Omegaonchain for bringing these recordings to life!
Workshops: Two Sessions and What’s Next
We held two more workshops before Zcon7!
Affine, Part 3, with Yendira, continued our series exploring open-source tools for organizing information and working together.
red·bridge, with Kit, introduced the project connecting Avalanche and Zcash. Robmar also made requested fixes to the livestream recording, so there’s an updated version to watch.
Our Workshops coordinators have started putting together the 2027 calendar, carrying forward ideas we won’t have time for this year.
Infrastructure: Getting Our Systems in Order
Our new Infrastructure Steward, Jack Murray-Brown, spent October getting under the hood of Zk Av Club’s servers.
He fixed Seafile’s HTTPS certificate and got its nightly backups running again after they’d been broken since April. Our Recording Station Omeka S archive also has nightly backups now, along with software updates, better security, and automatic restarts.
There’s still work to do. Backup restores need testing, WatchZ.cash needs email working for signups and password resets, and the separate Zcon Omeka S archive still needs to be set up. CryptPad can wait until 2027.
It feels good to be fixing the foundations instead of just adding more things on top.
Into November
November is already filling up! We’ll be sorting through everything from Zcon7, getting the Film Festival screening back on the calendar, and continuing our work on the archives, releases, and infrastructure.
For Milestone 10, the Zcon7 activation is complete. The final three historic Zcon uploads and the Film Festival screening and results remain outstanding, with follow-up planned in November.
Thanks to Zcash Community Grants and everyone who’s been making, editing, archiving, organizing, and experimenting with us. It’s been a big year of figuring things out together, and we’re finally seeing some of those ideas take shape!
Don’t just watch.